Mastodawn

Andy Baio Apr 7, 2017

Prediction: Mastodon will likely outlast Twitter.

Historically, decentralized, open-source platforms and protocols with any adoption run forever, even if they rarely reach the popularity or cultural relevance of centralized platforms.

It seems likely to me that when Twitter eventually shuts down, people will still be running Mastodon instances.

Did you know Diaspora has 328 active nodes and 17k users? Hell, there are 3,652 active FidoNet nodes, and that started in 1984!

So... am I wrong?

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SydneyEFalk

@andybaio

I think what I'm trying to say is this:

The utility of decentralization and open-source aspects of Mastodon are far more interesting to me than levels of adoption (tho those interest me as well), because levels of adoption aren't only a factor of ubiquity, they're also based heavily in utility.

Frex, if the Twitter codebase leaks, people will run that, somewhere, somehow, somewhen. It still won't approach the same utility, though.